Monday, May 30, 2016

What Changed?

When the Cold War ended, Colombia was a crime-infested war zone while
Venezuela, its neighbor to the east, was an island of sanity and
stability. Colombia is now one of the world’s hottest new tourist
destinations while Venezuela is on the brink of collapse.

Meanwhile, during most of that period, Venezuela held democratic
elections and experienced considerable, if uneven, economic growth.
Throughout Latin America, Soviet-backed insurgencies battled it out with
military regimes sponsored by the United States, but Cuba’s attempt to
foment communist revolution in Venezuela fizzled.

After the Berlin Wall fell, pro-Soviet forces all but evaporated
everywhere except in Colombia where the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias
de Colombia (FARC) swapped Moscow’s largesse with drug money.

If one had to choose where to invest at the time, the smart money
would have been on Venezuela. It had a small middle class and a great
deal of poverty, but that was hardly unique in South and Central
America. What set it apart was its vast oil reserves—more than any other country on earth—and its relative political stability.

The current United Socialist Party government led by Nicolás Maduro,
and formerly Hugo Chávez, could have done amazing things for the country
with that vast oil wealth. Instead, the party has done its damndest to
import Fidel Castro’s Cuban model of socialism— Chávez called Castro his
mentor—and turn Venezuela into a totalitarian anthill.

They never quite pulled it off, never quite managed to create a state
powerful enough to smother every human being under its weight. Rather
than molding Venezuelan society into a Stalinist Borg-hive, both—but
Maduro especially—presided over a near-total collapse into anarchy,
squalor and crime.